Nuthin' like playing with two great friends to make the game a blast. Above we see Wade, Bosh & LeBron yukking it up. (Yardbarker.com)

The world instantly judged the Miami Heat as Not Worthy after losing the opening game of the season to the Boston Celtics.  Despite them wining the next night in Philadelphia, Bill Simmons, aka The Sports Guy, published an early eulogy for LeBron James and company.  Now I’m no fan of LeBron or the Heat, but this seems like something many men suffer from: premature evaluation.

It kinda reminds me of the scene in Monty Python’s The Holy Grail where an undertaker walks through a town calling “Bring out yer dead!” but after a body is dropped on the heap it chirps up, “I’m not quite dead yet.”  When the undertaker reveals he won’t be back for a while, the person who dropped off the body decides it’d just be in everyone’s best interest to kill this person and get it over with now.  Luckily for the Heat, there are still 80 games left, not to mention that playoff thing, so there’s no need to rush to conclusions and cold-cock ‘em over the head (much as many of us would like to do).  That said, c’mon, I’m a guy, so I want to jump to some conclusions too.  Here are mine, none of which will corpsify the Heat:

(more…)

Don't let the open arms confuse you. If you say something David Stern doesn't like, he'll fine you. No, there's no truth to the rumor that The Beatles wrote "Back In The USSR" about him. (Source: Yardbarker.com)

First off, please, please, please don’t confuse me for a whiney Boston Celtics fan. I actually was excited for them two years ago when they got Kevin Garnett because I felt like KG and Paul Pierce were two guys who deserved a shot and I wanted to see what they could do. Then they both, particularly KG, turned into jerks. So now I’m staunchly anti-Celts. I hope they lose this series, and I’m psyched that the Magic won last night. But Orlando shouldn’t have been helped out so egregiously by the refs.

No, I’m not a conspiracy nut either who thinks the “League” told the refs to extend the series. I just think that the refs and the NBA honchos have let the power go to their heads. It’s insane how afraid the league is of dissention. For those who didn’t watch last night’s game, Kendrick Perkins, the one guy in the league who can do a decent job defending Dwight Howard solo, got two technicals and was tossed. The first happened when he was helping Paul Pierce up, but their grip slipped so his arm went back a bit into Orlando’s backup center Marcin Gortat. Gortat responded, slapping the ball away, and they got hit by double technicals. I understand that one. At the time, particularly from certain angles, it looked like Perk just maliciously elbowed Gortat on purpose. But upon video review, you can see it was more of an accident.

To read the rest of this, go to my original post on the main FanSided page.

Where is LeBron going? No, no, not in the picture, in free agency. (Source: Yardbarker.com)

Even President Obama is getting in on the action:

“He doesn’t want to tamper,” senior adviser to the president — and former Bulls season-ticket holder — David Axelrod said. “But as a Chicago fan, the president thinks LeBron would look great in a Bulls uniform.”

————————–

Despite my post disagreeing with Bill Simmons‘ diminished assessment of LeBron, he does bring up some interesting points about free agency.  Actually, one point which he brings up as something that won’t bring a title, I think is the opposite and is the way that Cleveland can get LeBron to stay:
(more…)

Just because LeBron is bent over, it doesn't mean you need to abuse him (Source: Yardbarker.com)

Okay, I know this is FanSided, not The LeBron James Non-Stop-Coverage Blog, but as has been stated by many people, the Cavs’ shocking loss has the potential to not just change the Cleveland franchise, but NBA history. Wherever LBJ goes, eventually championships will follow. So I’ve been shocked at the number of people who have summarily discounted his past performances to now label him as a player who just doesn’t have it. Bill Simmons, aka The Sports Guy, is a wonderful writer, but he’s a self-acknowledged knee-jerk sports fan. He writes what many others have said/written/twittered over the last few days:

There’s a feeling that [LeBron] can still get better, and with better teammates, maybe he could. But fundamentally, to paraphrase Bill Parcells, he is what he is at this point — a gregarious, larger-than-life, supremely gifted basketball player who’s better at making us say “WOW!” than anything else. If he owned that cutthroat Jordan chromosome, or Magic’s leadership chromosome, it would have surfaced by now.

Okay, LeBron doesn’t have Jordan’s cutthroat quality, but c’mon, Kobe’s the only other player who’s ever had that.  Then again, I’m not certain that killer quality is always best for a team.  Bill Russell has more rings than anyone, so clearly winning is a huge part of his genetic structure, but he would never mentally eviscerate a teammate the way Jordan did with Kwame Brown.  There’s something mesmerizing about that killer mentality in Jordan and Kobe, but that desire to win can be expressed in various ways as shown by Tim Duncan, Magic Johnson and tons of others.

For the rest of the post, click here.

(source: ESPN's "30 On 30")

Last night, ESPN premiered it’s most recent installation in their “30 on 30″ documentary series (inspired & led by Bill Simmons, it’s a look at 30 lesser-known stories from these past 30 years that ESPN has been in existence).  Even for a Knick fan, the Reggie Miller-centric documentary was funny, nostalgic, informative, and moving.  There’s something intriguing and different about a doc that looks back at something you lived through as opposed to introducing you to a new world you knew nothing about (although obviously for many people the doc will fall into the latter category).

First, at the time, New Yorkers (and probably most NBA fans in general) thought of Reggie Miller as the ultimate villain.  Michael Jordan was the guy who you wanted to defeat, but Reggie was the guy who you wanted to see get in an “unfortunate” car accident.  It wasn’t about what he did to the Knicks, it was about who he was and how he played.  He talked smack non-stop, played dirty, and would fake & flop to try to get non-existent calls.  And by dirty, I don’t mean physical, ‘cuz you were allowed to play darn physical at the time.  By dirty, I mean doing things when the refs weren’t looking.  Swingin’ them pointy elbows for sneak attacks whenever possible (by the way, there is no truth to the rumor that he rubbed his elbows with sandpaper to get them particularly sharp).  Read what his own sister, Cheryl, says about him in the doc:

(more…)